The Enforcement Directorate (ED) today said it has attached assets worth Rs 184.68 crore of Rajasthan-based Chartered Accountant (CA) and others in connection with its probe into an alleged bank fraud worth over Rs 1,000 crore. (Reuters)

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) today said it has attached assets worth Rs 184.68 crore of Rajasthan-based Chartered Accountant (CA) and others in connection with its probe into an alleged bank fraud worth over Rs 1,000 crore. The case pertains to an alleged Rs 1,055 crore fraud in three branches of the Syndicate Bank in Rajasthan’s Udaipur and Jaipur between 2011 and 2016. The attached assets belong to Udaipur-based CA Bharat Bomb and others including Shankar Lal Khandelwal, Himanshu Verma, bank manager Santosh Kumar Gupta and another banker Deshraj Meena and their family members.

The ED had first attached assets in this case in December 2016 and the total attachment of properties now stands at Rs 302.66 crore. The central probe agency issued a provisional attachment order under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) freezing a hotel, real estate projects and large pieces of prime agricultural and commercial lands worth Rs movable and immovable assets worth Rs 184.68 crore. The ED called Bomb and bank manager Gupta as the “master minds” of the fraud and said it has filed a criminal complaint in the case based on a first information report (FIR) by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) of March 2016.

The fraud was perpetrated by inter-linking fraudulent transactions between the three branches by resorting to discounting of forged cheques, discounting of forged inland bills and availing of overdraft facility against non-existent LIC policies, the ED said. This, the agency said, “caused the bank deliberately and with dishonest intention a huge loss to the tune of Rs 1,055 crore.”